


The Price of Time

by keire_ke



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Drama, F/M, Maybe a Fix-It, POV Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers Is Not Okay, Time Travel, Time travel is no therapy substitute, Timeline Shenanigans, discussion on the ethics of time travel, nothing ever truly ends, your issues travel with you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-20 06:09:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20223100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/pseuds/keire_ke
Summary: Steve comes back on a Tuesday. Peggy cries and holds him tight, but as she does she can't help but wonder: what was the price of him coming back to her, who will pay it, and will it be worth it?





	The Price of Time

**Author's Note:**

> Endgame ending provided an amazing ethical conundrum and a chance to twist the knife. The chance has been taken, by me. This fic has an open, seemingly harsh, ending for Steve, but my intention was hopeful. It's a "you can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need". See notes at the end.
> 
> Beta and encouragement by Elinimate. Thank you, hun!

## 1.

Steve comes back on a Tuesday.

Peggy shatters at the sight of him, holds out her arms, holds him tight and weeps, weeps like she hasn't wept since the static drowned out his voice on the radio.

"It's been so long…" she whispers into his shoulder. He bends his head to kiss her, and the details of the world fade away.

She keeps the lights in her living room low; she's not sentimental enough to invest in candles, but there is something about the softness and shimmer that they impart that makes her strive for the next best thing, even if the next best thing is a selection of pink, lacy lampshades. Everything has the veneer of a soft secret in this light, and maybe she shouldn't crave it, not considering her job, but it is just… pretty.

"I missed you so much," he says when their lips part and Peggy sighs.

He smells good. She's never had the chance to notice that before. His skin feels soft under her fingertips and his lips… Peggy digs the pad of her fingers into the back of his neck and draws herself up. To hell with her make-up, to hell with all of it.

Steve is _back_.

He is back and she won't waste another minute. She tears at the buttons of his shirt, and her fingernails seem blood-dark against the pale material, like she's digging not just through cloth.

"Peggy—"

"Later," she growls, and kisses him again, fiercely, amazed at her own boldness. 

He lets her tear at his buttons, undoes a few of hers, and keeps kissing her, and it is amazing, beautiful, everything she's ever dreamt of. It is like every dream and fantasy she's had, since that last sputtering radio wave has taken him away forever.

And yet. Peggy finds herself on Steve's lap, arms wrapped around his neck, tears streaming down her face. "I missed you," she whispers into his mouth. His arms tighten around her waist, and they sit there, wrapped up in one another, shirt and blouse in disarray. She rubs his collar absent-mindedly, and thinks…

She doesn't think; she lets herself process.

She feels the smooth slide of fabric between her fingertips, the strange shape of the collar; it is linen, she is pretty sure, but it is… softer than it should be. The peak of the collar yields under her fingers, collapses when pressed, but she can't feel the starch in it at all, yet somehow it holds its shape. He's wearing cologne, but the shirt itself smells like flowers, like lily-of-the-valley. It's a strange thing to smell on a man.

Peggy lifts her head from his shoulder.

"Steve, how did you get here?"

His arm trembles against her waist. "It's… a long story," he says, and the silence that follows has the weight of a freight car.

"You survived the crash," she tries again, mind racing.

"I did. I'm hard to kill."

"How did you escape the plane?" It's been—God, way too long. Far too long for him to have escaped the crash itself.

"I didn't. Peggy—"

She forces herself to sit up straight, one palm on his cheek. "Steve," she says, to herself as much as she says it to him. His skin is soft, and taut, but there are wrinkles around his eyes, his mouth, she doesn't recognise. Not many, not in this soft, pink light, at least. It is only now that she sees what she thinks is the difference, but she does see it.

Peggy slides off Steve's lap and goes to flip the switch, forcing her back to remain straight as she turns away from him and touches the wall. The softness melts away, back into its corners, back into the halo around the lamp on the commode, and no further, as she looks at Steve again.

It's not immediate, even now. But something about him, something about his face, is different.

"Steve?" she asks, and it is hushed this time, soft. She is pleading and she hardly understands why. "How did you escape the plane?"

He looks down at his hands. "I didn't. I was found. And thawed."

"Who found you?" Please, let it not have been the Russians, although that could have explained the weight about him, the slope of his shoulders. Please let it not have been them; it's been years. If Steve returned from Russia after two years, scrutiny would be inevitable. "Steve—no matter what happened, we can help you. We can make it right."

He laughs. At first it's just a snort, barely even a sound, but it has a following which snowballs, until Steve is laughing into his knees, his hands clenched into fists. "You have no idea."

"Then tell me."

He looks up, and she is not shocked at all to see tears in his eyes. "Peggy… I can't. I can't tell you. I've already meddled too much. We had no choice, we had to, but…"

"Meddled?" she says, but as she looks at him again, the impossible thread in the air seems to be weaving into something concrete, something not so easily ignored. He seems older, but that's no surprise, those that have walked through battlefields often do. This is not just that, however. She has seen battle-age in him before; she knows what to look for, and she finds it, and she finds it dwarfed by something she doesn't have the vocabulary to express. "Steve, you need to tell me." The softness is gone now, dissipated in the prosaic light. She hears the steel in her own voice, and though she tries to mask it, so does he.

"I came from the future," he manages eventually. "From… quite far in the future. I was found in the ice, frozen, and then I had the chance to come back here, and I took it."

Well, fuck me, Peggy thinks, dumbfounded. "How?"

"I can't give you the details. Not yet, at least."

She scrambles for the little she knows – which is nothing, no one knows, no one can know, but if she strains, truly strains, she can conjure whispers of thought on the subject – and tries to reason with the concept. "Will it cause problems if you tell me?"

"I don't know. They said that altering the past is not possible, looking from the future back, but a timeline can branch out, if something is changed in the past."

Peggy wonders how much is Steve getting paid in that future of his, because it doesn't appear in the relative paygrade of the entirety of the CIA. "Then… this is safe? Us, being here, together?"

"Yes," he says.

Peggy finds she cannot tell if he's lying. It's unsettling. But Steve would never put lives at risk like this, not unless he was absolutely sure this was fine.

She sits on the ottoman, clenches her hands around her knees and looks. Her lipstick is smudged all over Steve's mouth, and the effect is grotesque, scary. He's not exactly pale, but the deep red drains the pink out of his skin, makes his face sallow, like he's bleeding out. Like he bled out some time ago. She picks up a handkerchief and goes to him, lets his hands settle on her hips as she wipes the greasy red off. "Better," she mutters.

"Peggy…"

"It's late." God, when did it get so late? The clock on the wall is well past midnight, when it was barely ten last time she looked. "I have work tomorrow," she whispers against his forehead.

Steve sighs; the hair curling against her neck flutters, brushing up against her ear. She feels his hand tighten around her, holding on for dear life, and that makes her realize she is clutching him just as tightly in return.

"Let's go to bed," she says, because…

Well, because she wants to.

Steve looks at her, lost and unsure, and that's fine: Peggy can deal with that. She switches off the lights, finds his hands in the dark, drags his mouth to hers for a kiss, loses track of time and space.

They make it up the stairs, eventually, her by the grace of knowing the layout of her home, Steve by following her every move. She doesn't bother with the lamp in her bedroom, doesn't worry about the curtains, through which a yellow lamplight casts shadows onto the bed; there is no decent vantage point on the other side, and as long as the room remains dark, there is nothing to see.

She sees, though. She knows that Steve sees. She drags the oddly soft shirt off his shoulders, pushes up his undershirt, undoes the button on the front of his pants, while he fumbles with the buttons of her blouse.

God almighty, he is so _warm_…

She shucks the skirt, digs her fingernails into the lace of her garter belt, unlatches the hooks, undoes the clips, pulls Steve close again. "Put your hands on me," she commands, breathless, as she reaches back to undo her bra under her slip.

Steve obeys; his hands follow hers, press against her back, and up, taking the slip and the bra off and away, casting them to the chair by the wall, and they are skin to skin, finally. His palms feel like they are dragging hot wax down her flesh as they travel back down to push her underwear down. Peggy can't breathe, for fear of sobbing as she twists the two of them around, pushes Steve back onto the bed. The mattress yields under his weight, then hers.

She needs a condom, she thinks, as she hovers above him, struck with a moment's uncertainty. Dates fly through her head: will it be safe? Erskine said sterility is a possibility, although there was no way to know for sure, surely Steve can't possibly have an infection, she doesn't either, so…

There's a condom in the commode.

Peggy slides off the bed, rifles through her stockings and finds the thin box, thank god. Steve blinks up at her once she's back, but his head falls back at the touch of her hand, and he lets her do this without interruption. She sinks onto him slowly, biting her lip, distracted by the feather-light brush of his hand against her thigh, over the top of the stocking that stuck to her knee and refused to go down with her panties.

She feels him tremble, and it's good, so good; just being in the moment, only her and Steve in the whole world. She gasps when his fingers slip down her thigh and press gently right above where he's in her, while his other hand brushes against her breasts, travels up, until it is wrapped around the back of her neck, until he can pull her head down to meet his lips.

She is breathless when she reaches completion; it is almost too much to bear, but she rolls her hips to chase the sensation anyway, until Steve, too, gasps under her.

## 2.

Steve sleeps in the next morning. Peggy watches him, watches the lines on his face in the sunshine, too afraid to touch lest he disappear before her eyes, even if she still feels a shadow of an ache from their lovemaking last night. She could stay forever, but the day beckons: she has a meeting, she needs to wrangle Howard, she has six field reports to review. She cannot stay.

She presses a kiss to his forehead before she goes.

Outside, her heel barely touches the pavement when she reconsiders. She rushes back inside, tears a page out of a notebook and scribbles a message, which she tucks between the mirror and its frame. Steve won't miss it, for sure.

"I will see you when I return," the note says. "Don't let yourself be seen."

## 3.

"You seem to be in a good mood," Howard observes. Peggy looks up to find him standing over the far end of her desk, a file in one hand, a pen in the other.

"Yes," she tells him, though how and why can she possibly be in a good mood is a mystery: the report she's reading makes no sense, it reads like it was typed by an ardent piano player, who’s been attempting a symphony at the typewriter.

Or maybe it is because she's looked at the same page twice now.

Steve never slept in. Every morning he would show to the briefings bright-eyed and keen, so keen, to do his part. She doesn't get up that early.

Howard nods, his attention already beyond his opening statement. "Listen, I need you to sign off on this thing."

He sets the file on her desk and drums his fingers against its surface.

"Why?"

"I figure let's do this above board, maybe you can get Congress to pitch in."

Peggy frowns, but she opens the file. "What is…?"

An Arctic expedition. Multiple Arctic expeditions.

"You want to search the Arctic?"

"Why not? There's a good chance we'll find him."

For a second Peggy wants to tell him about Steve, whom she left in her bed this morning, but something stops her.

"Finding his body won't look good right now," she says, and just as the words leave her mouth she stops, paralysed. Time travel shouldn't be possible, and yet she couldn't help herself: she believed the man who came to her last night when he said he was from the future, no proof needed. She has seen him, seen the lines carved into his skin, faint though they may be, and there was no faking those. Steve has aged, well beyond what the past three years would have managed, and that realisation feels like a fuse has been lit directly inside her mind.

If that Steve is from the future, doesn't it follow that there is another Steve existing somewhere in the Arctic at this very moment? Doesn't it follow that she is falling into the arms of someone who isn't, in a way, supposed to be here? Doesn't it follow that now that she knows Steve, her Steve, is alive, that she owes it to him to find him first, before planning a life with the time-traveller?

Should she be planning a life with the time traveller at all?

Howard brings her back to reality with a scoff. He twirls the pen he brought between his fingers and taps its cap against the file. "If it's just a body. Even finding it is going to be useful—" he has the good sense to step back and hold up his hands as he says it, "—but I know, I know, it's not what you want to hear. But hear me out: we won't know if he survived until we find him."

Peggy looks right at him, thinks of how she woke up just hours ago, cheek pressed against the warm skin of Steve's arm, and says, "That seems unlikely."

"But possible. We know so little about the serum, Erskine was too cautious to speculate, but you have seen Steve. You have seen the things he could do."

"Howard… we can't allocate these kinds of funds to search for the body of a single soldier."

"We can, if it's research. And I'm sure it's going to be useful for other things as well."

"Well, let me know what other things you have in mind, then maybe we'll talk. And don't pretend that's the only thing on your mind, bring me everything you've got cooking."

"What's the point of you being in charge of budgeting if you have to vet everything?" he gripes, as he always does.

"This is a government agency, Howard," Peggy tells him, rolling her eyes. "Not a personal project fund. I am accountable for the money we spend, and you better believe I will get sacked if I'm not spending it right."

"This is why I hate working for the government. Erskine never had those issues."

"Erskine had a project the military couldn't say no to."

"Look." Howard takes a covert look around. "You're wrong about finding Rogers. We need to do it. We need to find him before the Russians do."

"We will find him," she says. "We can't make it our priority."

"We need him, Carter, badly. Someone's gotta wrangle those bureaucrats. They'd listen to him." Howard lets out a dreamy sigh. "Do you remember what it was like during the war? Anything Rogers deemed useful we got funded, no questions asked. Golden days. You wouldn't have to worry about reports, or kinds of funds, hell, research would be a priority. You wouldn't even need to lift a finger!"

Peggy takes a deep breath, though all she wants in this moment is to grit her teeth and scream. "Just be grateful we are not the CIA," she says, and forces herself to look down at the field reports.

## 4.

she walks out of the office at a reasonable hour, for once. It doesn't stop her from stuffing a bundle of files into her briefcase as she goes, and that is very reasonable, too, because she got absolutely no work done. She stops along the way to pick up groceries, and she is glad she did, because Steve is waiting for her in the kitchen, staring at the stove in something akin to confusion.

"Have you eaten anything today?" she asks, and he shakes his head. Peggy grimaces. She should have thought of it, but groceries were never high on her list of priorities.

She is not a great cook by any metric, but she bought macaroni and she bought cheese, and putting the two together does not require any sort of culinary proficiency. They eat it together, in the dining room, which may be the first time food has been put on the grand table since she's lived there. Peggy's guests tend to be entertained by files and blueprints, rather than aperitifs and roasts.

"How was your day?" she asks, once she finishes the last of the macaroni and pushes the plate away.

Steve is still eating, and it's somehow one of the most fascinating spectacles Peggy has ever been privy to. He doesn't seem to be tasting the food: the fork just makes the journey from the plate to his mouth and back, like it's one of Howard's automatic contraptions for shovelling. "It was fine."

"I'm glad." It was fine? She didn't see the note when she came in, so presumably he heeded it and spent the day inside, but what was there to do inside? He didn't cook, her book collection consists of a set of encyclopaedias, and there is very little spare paper in the house to draw on.

What do people of the future do in their leisure time?

She's dithering, and she doesn't love that she's dithering, but it feels awkward to start this conversation over food. It feels like an armistice, of a sort, and she'd be loath to break it, even though they aren't even fighting, but in the end she must, someone must, and drawing this out is cruel to them both.

"You can't stay," she says, blurts, and God, though she spits the words out they feel like they are dragged out of her body: she feels each one.

So does Steve.

"Peggy—what?"

"How would it even work?" she asks, unable to contain the swell of heat and dread that's boiling in her stomach. "You died! Everyone knows you died, how do we explain that you are here now? Someone is bound to recognise you. You don't know—I assume you don't know, but your face is in comic books now, the children play with trashcan lids painted red, white and blue, there are trading cards! How do we explain that?"

"We don't need to explain anything, I will just… stay out of sight."

Peggy lets out a laugh, a deep, ugly sound she could swear she wasn't capable of until now. "Steve, you can't possibly be this stupid. I work in intelligence; I need to disclose personal engagements. If I took a husband who came out of nowhere, there would immediately be half a dozen agents dedicated to figuring you out, and really, what's there to figure out? All they would need is to look at you to know what happened. The secret wouldn't last a week, not when there are entire wings of buildings dedicated to making sure there are no Soviet assets infiltrating us."

"Then we tell the truth," Steve says, stubborn to the last, but his composure is held together with cobwebs, she can see that now.

"What truth? Steve, don't you see? If I don't report your miraculous return, then someone will find out, and my career would be over! No one will trust me with any intel, if they suspect I'll keep things to myself. And if I do report your return, then we're dooming you – the other you – to die in the ice. You can't ask me to accept leaving you to die."

"We'll go and find him. I know the coordinates."

"So then there would be two of you! How do you propose we handle that?"

He shakes his head, drags his hands through his hair, throws himself out of his chair almost too fast for her to follow, and stalks into the living room.

Breathe, she instructs herself; breathe. She stares at the remnants of the fat and cheese in the pan, listening to what little sound Steve makes in the other room. Finally, she stands and follows, one step at a time, as though she's going into battle.

"What is the truth, Steve?" she asks gently, stopping by the door, hip against the frame. "Why are you really here?"

"I came to be with you."

"Why?" she asks, and she can see – God almighty, she can see him stagger as though shot. The lines in his face seem to set, locking _something_ away. It frightens her: Steve's shoulders stiffen, his hands close. He doesn't say anything, but he is staring at her, his eyes wide. "You said you came from the future, why weren't you with me then?" God help her, but her hands close, too, and within a few heartbeats she finds she's sidled to the bureau, where she keeps a spare gun. There should be a clip alongside it; when was the last time she checked?

"It's complicated, you had a family, you had a life—"

"What?" She lets her hand drop from the wood and she takes a step towards the centre of the room, towards Steve. "I… have a family?"

"Not yet!"

"But in the future you came from I had a family, and the family was not you."

Steve grits his teeth so hard she can see the texture of the tendons in his jaw as he looks away. "That future cannot be altered. It's safe."

Safe, she thinks in a daze. I have a family, children? A husband, maybe. "Was I happy with them? Will I be happy with them?"

Steve's whole body spasms and for a moment she worries he will lie, but when he meets her eye she knows he would not be capable of a lie, not in the state he's in. "You said… you lived your life, and your one regret was that I didn't get to live mine."

It feels like the curtains are on fire, like all the lights have come on at once and she can barely breathe, because all the air she could draw would be filled with embers. Every little detail, every line on his face, the tired slope of his shoulders, the belaboured way he seems to breathe, everything, _everything_ feels like it's burning through her skin.

"Then how dare you come here?!" she stalks across the room, fists clenched. "How dare you! How dare you meddle with my family! How dare you take them away from me!" She throws the first punch; she will not apologise for that. He blocks it, as she knew he would, so she stomps on his foot with her heel.

It's a miscalculation. It hurts him: she can see the expression on his face, but his hand has closed around her wrist and it won't budge. It does not budge when she swings her other fist, not when he side-steps the knee she's aimed at his groin: no matter what she tries, his had remains in the exact same position, locked around her wrist.

"Let go," she commands, and yanks her hand away when his grip loosens. She is back across the room before she knows it, wrenching the drawer of the bureau open. She's got the gun in her hand and the clip inserted faster than she can think about it. She doesn't lift the pistol once it's loaded, but she doesn't put it away, either. The blinding rage has abated, the air no longer burns, but the colours are still too bright, the roar of blood is still loud in her ears.

"Get the fuck out of my house," she grinds out.

"Me and you, Peggy," he says, softly, as though he can't see what's in front of him. "Imagine it."

"I did. Then you died and it was over."

"It's not. Right now it is not. We have a chance now to make it right, to make everything right."

"What is there to make right, Steve? You chose to put the plane in the water over being with me. You don't get to take that back, and I swear if you tell me now that was the wrong choice, I will kill you. I swear to God, I will shoot you dead right now."

"We could have had a life."

"All we ever had was a chance, Steve. Once upon a time we had a chance. We lost it. You gave it up, because it was either that, or let New York die. If us being together was the price of saving this city, then I am glad we paid it."

Steve is shaking his head, but she comes forward, and forces him to take a step back, until he sits heavily on the couch, so that she is leaning over him, his forehead against her stomach. He's trembling, and she cards her fingers through his hair.

"No matter how much you may think that this will work now, it won't. It can't. You can't change the past," she tells him, but of course he is here, now, so she amends: "And if you can, then you mustn't. All you can do is move forward."

"No," Steve says. He tries to shake his head, but instead manages only to tremble all over. "No. I can't. I can't go back there."

"Back? Steve, _this_ is going back! I'm sorry this happened to you, I'm sorry you didn't get to live through the years after the war, but it happened. You need to put the past behind you, where it belongs." Something in her seizes as she says it, when she looks at his face, crumbled in distress. Now, more than before, she sees the age in him, the years he lived that he's barely mentioned. She would have loved this man, once upon a time, if they'd spent those years together, if there were mirror lines on her own skin. "You need to let me go."

Steve's body, this miracle of science and desperate hope, shakes as though he is coming apart.

"I hate the future. There's just… so much of it. Everything is different, everything changes."

This, this right there, is a punch to the solar plexus. Those three sentences dig into her skin and push the air out of her lungs, and they burn, burn like an electric current running through her body, and it's a whole new kind of fury. She can see him so clearly, now, and she curses every detail that she sees.

"And you came here to hide from change?" she grits out, spits out the words like they are poison. She takes a step back, her grip on the gun suddenly the only thing keeping her centred. "You came here, because you know what's going to happen and you won't have to worry about the world changing?"

"No, that wasn't—"

"Don't you dare lie to me. You came here and you told me you knew I had a family. My life is an open book to you, isn't it? You know exactly what's going to happen in my future, and you know when. Your being here means I will not have that family, my family."

"Peggy, I can't change my past! Your family is in the past, my past!"

"You came here to make sure they don't exist for me?"

"They will exist! The timeline will branch, nothing will change in the other one!"

"What do I care about some other timeline? I'm here, now, and you are… what, Steve? Here to make sure I choose the right family? That is not your choice to make."

"I wanted to be with you. I've always wanted that."

"I wanted that too. I wanted that more than anything."

"Then—"

"I spent so much time thinking what if, if only you didn't die, if only there was a way to bring you back. And now…" She hesitates, thinking hard about what it is that's coursing through her head. "But you didn't come back, not really. You lived so long, in such a different place, that I don't know you, I just know you are not my Steve."

Silence fills the room. Peggy counts the ticks of the clock as she waits for Steve to speak.

"Who am I, then?"

"I don't know. I do know you don't get to hide in the past. You don't get to run from change."

"Why not?" he asks stubbornly, and her heart breaks all over again. What happened to you, she wonders but does not ask. What happens in the future that's worse than the trenches of the world war that would make you like this?

"You don't run, Steve. You never did," she says in the end, only to watch him scoff. "And… if that's what you do now, if that's who you are… then I don't think I want you anymore."

"Peggy—"

"Even if I did," she says, as the shape, the horror, crystalizes before her eyes, "Even if I did, it can't be you. Not this you. I can't have you dictating what I am allowed to do to safeguard the future that you want. I need to be able to choose for myself."

"You do get a choice! you get to make all the choices, so that it goes right this time! That's why I'm here, I can tell you exactly what to do so that—"

"So that your perfect future comes true? No, Steve. No."

"There's so much we could fix…"

"There's so much we could break! No one can live knowing the future! What kind of life would that be?"

A sharp light illuminates the far side of the living room; the shadows pass across it, quickly, as a car moves down the street, too fast to be looking for a parking spot. Steve is staring at the floor, both his hands buried in his hair.

Peggy, though the rug feels like its swaying under her feet, stands firm. "Steve… why did you come here? Really?"

It takes him a whole minute to respond. "I… can't. I can't live there. I can't."

"I don't think you have a choice, Steve," she says. "Not in this."

"I can't. Peggy… I can't. It went wrong, all of it. We fixed it, as much as we could, but it's still… What if it happens again? What if I let them down again?" He looks up at her, begging for understanding, perhaps, for absolution, and God, she sees he is hurting, hurting as she'd only seen once before, in that London pub, but she also realizes there is nothing she can do.

There is no absolution here. There can be none. It's not her place to offer it.

She's not even sure she would if she could.

"You need to leave," she says instead. "Whatever you need right now, you won't find it here."

"Peggy—"

"I need you to leave," she says, and stops trying to hold back the tears, the fury, the shaking of her hands. "Leave. Go. Don't you dare come back."

"You don't understand, your future—"

"My future is my business, Steve," she tells him. "I can't live like this, Steve. You know how it's all going to unfold, and I can't live knowing you have information which could shape the world and not use it."

"Then use it. I will tell you everything, it won't matter, the past can't be changed, the time I came from will be safe."

"I can't. No one can. You can't make those choices for other people, Steve, you can't just show up from the future and decide what the world is going to look like." She shakes her head and feels her makeup dissolve in the tears that are running down her cheeks. "I can't take responsibility for the entire world, and neither can you."

He grits his teeth and she sees in his face a flash of the skinny, angry young man he used to be. It is faint and that scares her more than anything. "What were you planning to do, Steve? With all this knowledge? Call Truman, tell him to call Stalin? Tell him what? That they should all listen to you, because you know the future?"

"I can prove it."

Oh Steve. "Do you honestly think that would make them listen? Can you seriously tell me heads of state will do as you say, even if you show them incontrovertible proof of your words?"

"You could make them listen. We could. Together."

Peggy feels her nails against the meat of her palms as she imagines it. Steve and her, remaking the world as it should be, knowing what's coming at every turn, guiding the events so that they go just so. Making sure people make the right choice, guiding them towards the right choice so that they never know…

"No." It lands, heavy and final. "I will not. And I won't let you, either."

He startles, then, but he startles like a tectonic plate. First he blinks, then his mouth twists, and he then he raises to his feet, towering over her and yet somehow looking so much smaller.

"What?" he asks.

The gun left red and pink imprints on the skin of her palm. She ejects the clip, puts both back into the drawer and closes it forcefully. She leaves the room without a backwards glance, knowing that Steve will follow.

The door squeaks when she pulls it open. She stands aside and holds it, and only then does she meet his eyes.

"Peggy, please…" he whispers, comes up to her and leans in, his face in her hair. "Please."

There is a scratch in the wood. It hasn't been painted over when the house was renovated; must have happened when the furniture was carried in, a slash of pale honey brown bursting out the white. If she angles her finger just so, she can feel the woodgrain against her skin. She holds on to it, even as he reaches out to cup his cheek.

"Goodbye, my darling," she says, and takes half a step back.

He crosses the threshold, looks back at her one last time. She holds his gaze, tears and all, and does not look away, even when he does. She watches him move his hand, she watches as his body is enveloped in a suit of white armour, something she could swear she's seen on the cover of a pulp once, with the words "Buck Rogers" plastered across the page.

It suits him, she thinks, and the thought catches her off-guard. He is wrong about this, about the future. This… magical armour that appears at a touch of a button suits him well. She can only pray he realises it in time.

She blinks and he is gone.

## 5.

Peggy grips the door and breathes, slams it shut and throws herself against it, fists pounding against the wood. She screams, and cries, and hurts, and lets herself bleed.

Then she stands. She goes to wash her face, wipes mascara off her lashes and her cheeks, carefully removes the lipstick from her mouth. She scrubs at her skin until it is raw and pink and matches her splotchy eyes. She washes her hands next, dabs rubbing alcohol onto the split skin of her knuckles.

The state of her kitchen, save for the remnants of their meal, is immaculate, in that it has barely been touched since she lived here, accustomed as she is to working late and eating at the office. This holds true for the contents of the cupboard under the sink: the woman she pays to come over to clean twice a month is smart enough to give the unused kitchen only a cursory dusting, and uses the supplies in the closet, instead. Under the sink Peggy finds a bucket, and in the bucket there are soft rags. She rinses one and carefully cleans her blood off the door, wincing as she sees a dent in the wood, decorated with smeared blood. This door wouldn't stand up to a kicking, in the event of an invasion.

"I need a better door," she mutters, returns the rag to the kitchen, and rifles through the handbag for her calendar. She makes a note to start looking into a sturdier door, and then her gaze falls on the pile of papers she brought home with her.

On top of the pile there's the file containing Howard's personal projects, and on the very top of those there is the Arctic exploration.

Peggy sits down. Howard put some serious work into the boring parts of it: the science and research are front and centre, but the side benefits that would be of use for intelligence work get more than a passing mention. The lofty assumption is that, given enough funding, chances are good they could have the Arctic regions thoroughly mapped within the next few years, a decade at most. There's materials research, technology this venture could aid, what this would mean for the monitoring of Russian submarines, but at the core she can see the shape of what she knows it's really about.

Peggy sets the file down, reaches for the pen and, right at the very bottom, writes "denied – projected benefits to submarine monitoring systems do not justify expenditure". She signs her name, picks up the next proposal, and immediately hits a hurdle in the form of the name included in the first paragraph.

Arnim Zola.

Arnim Zola… well, wasn't the whole point of bringing him in to use his brain to do something right? If he's on one of Howard's projects, at least he'll be under close supervision.

She pages through the proposal: there are schematics there she does not fully understand, a sketch of a… brain? At least something Peggy assumes is a brain, with what she continues to assume is the nervous system with several points marked on it, within the outline of might be a shoulder.

She turns a page and there's a head, which: well, she was right about the brain. Dear Lord, let it not be about telepathy. But no: the descriptions are full of words such as "neural input" and "neuro-electric interface", which, she has an inkling, most scientists would say belongs in _Jabberwocky_ rather than a serious scientific proposal, but there must be some merit there. Possible applications include storing data, artificial intelligence, listening devices, and advanced prosthetics, she learns, and immediately thinks of Daniel.

SSR wasn't conceived to research prosthetics, but Peggy's been around Howard enough to know that dividends are an inevitable result of giving him problems to solve. Funding anything Zola had his fingers in would be criminally insane, but… she needs Howard distracted right now, most of all. This will do nicely.

She approves it.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> I don't see Steve staying in the past as a good _ending_ for Steve (or Peggy, for that matter, but that basically is the story here). Most of the reason is that I honestly don't see Steve living in the 50s as anything but an ironic hell. "Man out of time" is mentioned a lot, but frankly the only time Steve is shown to be completely at peace with his place in the world is active duty during WW2, when there was a very clear division between good and bad. He will not find it in the 1950s and 60s.
> 
> I also think Steve leaving like he did was a dick move to his 21st century friends, and, more importantly, to Gay Joe Russo... c'mon, Steve, think of Gay Joe Russo! The man counted on you for emotional support!
> 
> Peggy was a strong influence since the moment they met: she was able to pierce through his armor and point out where his focus needs to be. He needed that here, and with luck he will get help and learn to accept things he cannot change.
> 
> I also love stable time loops, and that trope where trying to prevent a thing causes the thing.
> 
> **Notes edited on 16Aug2019**
> 
> Find me on [Tumblr](https://keire-ke.tumblr.com/) / [Twitter](https://twitter.com/keire_ke) / Discord (keire_ke)


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